Lawsuit: Apple turned iPhone 3Gs into "iBricks" to boost iPhone 4 | Hacker News Reader

Lawsuit: Apple turned iPhone 3Gs into "iBricks" to boost iPhone 4

arstechnica.com

34 pointsrecoiledsnake48 comments

Yup, 4.0 sucked for the 3G. Kind of appalling QA for a company like Apple to let that slip out. The 3G at that point was two generations behind, seemingly giving Apple no large incentive to fix the performance problems.

But you know what? They did anyway.. The 4.1 release made these phones (including mine) usable again. I still think they screwed up badly, but I give them props for fixing the problem reasonably quickly when there were clear incentives for not doing so.

4.1 made it better but definitely does not completely fix the problem. My 3G iPhone is still significantly slower than it was pre iOS4.

Can someone sue Microsoft for slowing my computer with Windows 7? They don't provide any easy tools to downgrade and preserve my data... It's almost like they want me to but a new computer with Windows 7 -- another duplicated license to what I already own.

Plug your phone in and iTunes will prompt you to upgrade. Doesn't quite work that way with Windows :)

I don't think that is a fair comparison. Going out of your way to buy a new version of Windows (which has clear hardware requirements) and slapping it on old hardware is much different than syncing your phone and following directions for a standard upgrade.

Windows performance can suck on hardware well above the "minimum system requirements", and this has taught most computer users to know that new features come at a price.

Mac OS X's trend of new releases being faster on the same hardware is a shockingly rare exception to the norm, and due to Apple's habit of releasing features before they're optimized. (The whole Quartz system took several releases to get up to acceptable performance, and Spotlight also made very significant gains after the initial release.)

Obviously they weren't taught well enough to know that iOS 4 would slow things down, too :/.

It's most certainly not a fair comparison and I'm most likely trolling here, but at the moment I considered it a (somewhat) interesting point.

(Edit: And Microsoft supports downgrades. I can't defend my own argument. In fact, on anything newer than an iPhone 3G, it is literally impossible to downgrade, while a 3G is just "difficult".)

I take it you never experienced the wondrous performance of a device running iOS 1.x? Seriously: software does more over time, and the hardware gets better to better be able to run it. If you install newer versions of Mac OS or Windows or Word or iPhoto or /whatever/ on an older machine you are not going to be happy with the experience.

Good luck to her proving malice. Claiming that the product isn't fit for purpose would seem to be pretty straight forward but I'm not sure how she's going to prove that they did it intentionally to increase iPhone 4 sales.

Considering they have to prove it was unsuitable for purpose and intent I would expect just proving unsuitably for purpose is their fall back position.

I'm not sure fall backs work that well in law. In some cases the fact you failed to make one argument undermines your overall position. I think generally you're better off focusing on what you can prove.

I don't know about that--email is so convenient, it seems like someone is always dumb enough to email something incriminating, and knowing that, lawyers subpoena them.

Yes but getting hold of those mails is another matter entirely.

Apple had two choices: release iOS4 for 3G and let it run slowly, or require 3GS+ to run iOS4. They went with the first option. My bet is that if they'd gone with the second, she would have sued them for obsoleting her 3G too quickly.

Those weren't their only two choices, since iOS 4.1 fixed the performance problems with the 3G. (Not that this suit has any merit, especially in light of that.)

If they needed time to fix those problems, then this would delay release of iOS4 and iPhone 4.

Well, I guess people would've been pissed if the 3G was not updated, but sue? I don't think so.

Ridiculous. There is no imaginable basis for suing Apple for not supporting one's existing hardware with new iOS releases.

3G owners would have grumbled a bit if they'd been denied iOS 4, but they'd have gotten over it.

here is no imaginable basis for suing Apple for not supporting one's existing hardware with new iOS releases.

I think most people would agree with you if in fact Apple supported a method to downgrade/revert the OS version. For most people there was no way to know just how bad 4.0 was, until it was too late.

That's not what I meant, though -- I was referring to the GP's notion that people would actually sue Apple if they didn't allow the 3G to upgrade to iOS 4 at all.

Ok, I misunderstood. I got the impression the GP was just joking which is why I didn't think you were responding seriously to his comment. I agree there would be no basis for such a lawsuit.

Does Apple come across as a company that needs to resort to such tactics to force people to buy new phones? They build better devices (faster, more memory, better battery) that in themselves are enough to entice users to upgrade if they desire. The accusations of this lawsuit are honestly more likely of cell carriers (here's looking at you, Verizon).

I don't know if you had a 3G, but the IOS4 upgrade made adamant on my decision to ditch the iphone and go to android.. It would lag out for 3 or 4 seconds while dialing a number -- it became unusable as a basic phone, let alone a smart phone. It had nothing to do with the carriers.

iOS 4.1 did fix all of the performance problems that the iPhone 3G did have. The real problem here is the amount of time it took Apple to implement the fixes required.

4.1 did not fix all the problems: many people (including me!) find that the OS is still much more sluggish than it was on 3.x. I still see delays of up to several seconds in between keystrokes when typing sometimes, which makes typing really unpleasant and frustrating.

It tends to get worse over time until I reboot my phone, given that the iPhone 3G has less RAM than the 3GS or 4 I guess there's a memory leak somewhere that hasn't been fixed, but there's likely other issues too.

It really did feel like Apple didn't even bother to test the iPhone 3G, which is madness.

I don't have to restart regularly, but I can agree that it's slower than iOS 3.x, sure. The typing lag is indeed the worst; it was horrid on 4.0 and is occasionally laggy still.

I can't figure out why it seemingly wasn't tested on the old hardware though. Maybe it was just with the bare install? It just seems uncharacteristic.

Yes. I mean, the term "resort" is pretty pejorative, but having worked with Apple products in both the design (video/audio composition and editing) and education (5,000+ UG), Apple's 'planned obsolescence' is pretty devastating. The two ready-to-hand examples:

LogicPro - the migration from a dongle-based system to a non-dongle system was an utter nightmare where some people were able to maintain their old license and pay the upgrade price while others couldn't.

PPC -> Intel - the migration in driver architecture was a nightmare across the entire Apple ecosystem. "Better/faster/just works" did not apply here at all. As a classic example: the version of Final Cut released shortly after the architecture switch was unable to run natively on Intel. Shortly after the Universal Binary version was released, Apple broke compatibility with After Effects plugins and instead replaced it with FxPlugin and once again caused a huge disruption.

So yes, it does in fact seem like the sort of thing Apple would do.

For an overwhelming majority of applications out there, it really was just "recompile and it works" or even using Rosetta for the interim, until the developer got around to it. Apple even created a script that automatically converted scalar types into an architecture-safe equivalent (int -> NSInteger, for example).

Final Cut, Adobe CS and a few other major products are the exception to the migration, not the rule. I've spoken to people who used to work on Final Cut. It has one of the largest codebases that I've ever heard of. Plus, Final Cut wasn't done in Objective-C and Cocoa. It is a C++ application with a completely custom UI, done by Macromedia over a decade ago. Its not even a full 64-bit application yet.

You forgot to mention the power connectors on the laptops.

The performance problems affected the older models of iPod touch, too, didn't they? And the updated iPod touch (with retina display/camera/etc) wasn't out then, so it's clear Apple wasn't pushing people to upgrade to the brand new model in that case. Besides, the performance problems were cleared up with iOS 4.1.

People would have been so miffed if they would have told them iOS 4 wasn't available for the 3G.

"OMG, they are forcing us to upgrade!"

What would they have them do? Send out free (better) hardware everytime they update iOS in a major way? That just doesn't seem right.

The kind of user who starts sentences with “OMG” is the kind of user who doesn’t know iOS 4.0 is out until the apps they use start being released without 3.x compatibility — if then — and doesn’t even often sync with their computer.

People would have been miffed, and left with a iPhone that still worked (just like owners of the first generation iPhone).

Just curious what kind of damages is Ms Wofford is able to get from such lawsuit if she wins? an iPhone 4 or millions? The lawyer costs more than an iPhone 4 right?

Presumably they have filed to have Apple pay their legal fees, should they win.

Based on the outcome of the scratched nano lawsuit, it should go something like this:

All iPhone 3 owners will get a $10 Apple store credit.

The lawyers will get about $10 million in cash.

Ms. Wofford, as the lead plaintiff, will get a bonus of about $10k in cash.

This plus the Buzz case really underlines how broken the class action tort system is. "Hey, we're the lawyers, we work for you, that's why we get ten million and you get ten thousand, and if you don't like it we'll go work for someone else."

I was using my 3G until 2 weeks ago running iOS 4. Not the best experience early on with 4.0 but it got quite a bit better with subsequent releases.

I'll admit, I upgraded my 3G to the 4 because of how uselessly slow it was. I wonder if I can get a piece of the class action?

I don't think this really has any ground. It's not like you were forced to upgrade to iOS 4.

Right but i think the issue is more that once you have upgraded and realize the problems, you are practically forced to keep it as there isn't an easy way to roll back to a previous iOS release.

The upgrade is practically automatic. iTunes nags you every time you plug in an out-of-date iPhone and only requires a single click. That and the jump from 3.3.1 to 4.x is an absolute night-and-day excruciating difference in speed and usability.

Only the jump to 4.0 is excruciating; 4.1's performance is on-par with 3.1.3

It merely helped in my situation. If 3.1.3 ran at 100%, 4.0 ran at 40-50% and 4.1 bumped it back up to 60-70% at best (in my experience).

It's not 4.x, it's 4.0. 4.1 and 4.2 beta run just fine on iPhone 3G.

You might not be forced to upgrade to iOS 4 but you are then left with an old unpatched OS that let things like jailbreakme happen. Also if you try to get any help from Apple they refuse to do it without your device being fully upgraded, at least that has been how it has been for me.

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